THE C\NADIA.N ENTOMOLOGIST. 251 



who will never admit making a mistake, I reluctmtly accepted Dr. Smith's 

 reference, which, through the discovery by Mr. Bird of the true tielita, 

 has been shown to have been erroneous. 



Mr. Bird calls my statement that the usual longitudinal lines in the 

 larva oi cr^rata are all continuous " meagre," and suggests that as Burdock, 

 from which I bred it, is very generally bored by cataphrada, the question 

 may be open to possible error. Had I only found a larva which I sup. 

 posed to be that oi cei-ata, Mr. Bird's suggestion would be warranted, but 

 seeing that I have bred the moth repeatedly from these larvae, there is no 

 peradventure in the matter. I have bred this form in four different years, 

 and have secured thirteen moths, of v/hich my six types and three other 

 specimens are still in my collections, and the others have been presented 

 by me to Mr. Bird, Dr. Fletcher, the British Museum and the National 

 Museum at Washington, and 1 have an inflate of the larva kindly mide 

 for me by Mr. Gibson. My statement was merely made to show that it 

 could be separated at a glance from the larva of rutila with which it was 

 associated. 



Mr. Bird refers to Burdock being frequently bored by cataphrada, 

 and that is the case at Ottawa where 7'iitila has not yet been found, but 

 cataphrada has never been found boring in Burdock here, and was not 

 known to occur here until I bred it from Eupatorium picrpureum. When 

 I found the larva in that plant, I thought I had discovered another new 

 species, being misled by Mr. Bird's erroneous statement* that the larva is 

 almost identical in markings with that of nitela^ which he described as 

 having the subdorsal lines absent from the first four abdominal segments, 

 but on obtaining larvae oi cataphrada in Burdock from Ottawa from Mr. 

 Gibson, I found that they were identical with mine from the Eupatorium. 



JErata I have only found in one limited locality in Westmount, a 

 suburb of Montreal, and its existence there is threatened every year 

 through the abominable practice of the municipal authorities of having 

 the Burdocks along the edge of the street cut down, and its existence so 

 far is probably due to its habit of boring in the lower part of the stalk, as 

 I have sometimes found rutila boring in the upper part of the stalk and 

 cerata in the lower part. 



The following description of the larva o( cerata was made on the 14th 

 July, 1907, from a larva found boring in Burdock, near the root, on that 

 date, the larva being apparently about half-grown. 



*Can. Ent., XXX., 129. 



